By the time she met Charlotte Mason in September 1927, Zora Hurston had come to believe in her own power to conjure good things in her life. Still, when Hurston walked into Mason’s elegant penthouse at 399 Park Avenue, she must have been astonished. Not by the majestic view of Manhattan from the gleaming windows, nor by the old woman’s excessive wealth, manifest in her impeccable dress and her beautifully furnished, art-filled home. What astounded Zora were the calla lilies.
In one of the prophetic dreams that recurred throughout her youth, Zora had seen herself entering a big house where two women waited for her. “I could not see their faces, but I knew one to be young and one to be old. One of them was arranging queer-shaped flowers such as I had never seen,” Hurston remembered of the dream. “When I had come to these women, then I would be at the end of my pilgrimage, but not the end of my life. Then I would know peace and love and what goes with those things, and not before.” As Mason’s young assistant, Cornelia Chapin, orchestrated the calla lilies in their lovely vase, the white-haired lady of the house looked her visitor over with intense, shining eyes. Returning Mason’s gaze, Zora realized that the last of her childhood prophecies had come true. In that surreal moment, she knew the fulfillment of her final vision could mean only one thing: “I had gotten command of my life.”
Hurston’s recent disappointing foray into fieldwork, however, had tempered her tendency toward cockiness. So when she wrote to Langston Hughes about her September 20 meeting with Mason, a sanguine Hurston downplayed the magical quality of the day: “I think that we got on famously,” she ventured. “God, I hope so!”
In that first encounter—likely arranged by Alain Locke and certainly encouraged by Hughes—Zora spoke to Charlotte Mason about the black folk opera that she and Langston had been talking about for more than a year. “She likes the idea of the opera,” Hurston reported to Hughes, “but says that we must do it with so much power that it will halt all these spurious efforts on the part of white writers.”
Though wholly white herself, Mason—born Charlotte van der Veer Quick—often expressed disdain for white people elbowing in on black culture. A friend of presidents and bankers, Mason claimed to be “altogether in sympathy” with rank-and-file Negroes, according to Hurston, because she believed them to be “utterly sincere in living.”
More than she liked the idea of the Hurston-Hughes folk opera, Mason liked Hurston. The septuagenarian was impressed by the young woman’s effulgent intellect and absolute lack of pretension. Although she was thoroughly learned, Zora was unlike Locke and other carefully mannered Negroes of Mason’s acquaintance in that her negritude seemed undiminished by her education. Zora’s grammar was proper yet free from affectation. She did not pitch her voice in a way to mask the blackness of its timbre, nor did she shamefacedly chase the South out of her diction. Zora was, a delighted Mason observed, as Negro as she could be. And despite all the differences between them—in age, race, and wealth—Hurston and Mason had much to discuss.
The widow of prominent physician Rufus Osgood Mason, Charlotte Mason herself was an amateur anthropologist who had spent time, many years earlier, among the Indians of the Great Plains. Later, she’d financed the research that resulted in Natalie Curtis’s The Indians’ Book, a 1907 volume of songs and legends. Well into her seventies when Zora met her, Mason was a longtime champion of “primitivism.” For her, this was a form of racial essentialism rooted in a conviction that black people—if they’d only be their “savage” selves—could save whites from the aridity of civilization. Mason believed in cosmic energies and intuitive powers, and she was sure that “primitive” people, particularly American Indians and Negroes, were innately more in tune with these supernatural forces than were whites, who, in Mason’s view, were not only overly civilized but also spiritually barren.
As a daughter of the conjure-rich black South, Zora also believed in mystical forces, and often felt attuned to them, as her soothsaying dreams proved. Though Mason’s money was generations old, Hurston saw in the blue-blooded woman someone who was, as she put it, “just as pagan as I.” Convinced that Mason’s interest in black culture was genuine, Zora immediately offered to take her to the Harlem church that she and Hughes liked to attend. The “primitivism” that Mason held in such high esteem flourished at this church, where worshipers sang God’s praises in a raw, unrehearsed way—and welcomed possession by the Holy Ghost in keeping with an old-time religion that was more ancient than they themselves knew.
Mason did not need to go to church in Harlem, however, to get in the spirit. Months before, she had fully committed herself to supporting the New Negro movement, generously financing any black art that she deemed good and worthy. For several years, Mason had been mildly interested in Negro uplift and had donated money to black schools in the South. But her career as a Negrotarian began in earnest early in 1927 when she introduced herself to Alain Locke after hearing him lecture on African art. With all deliberate speed, Locke became Mason’s trusted (and handsomely paid) adviser on Negro matters, introducing her to a series of talented artists. At Locke’s urging, Mason became patron to painter Aaron Douglas, sculptor Richmond Barthe, musician and composer Hall Johnson, and writers Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. Viewing her patronage as a spiritual mission of sorts, the charismatic Mason required all those who benefited from her benevolence to call her “Godmother.” She also insisted that they keep her identity a secret. Violation of this cardinal rule, she assured them, would result in immediate banishment from the queendom.
Godmother “possessed the power to control people’s lives—pick them up and put them down when and where she wished,” Hughes would observe. Yet, he wrote, she was “one of the most delightful women I had ever met, witty and charming, kind and sympathetic, very old and white-haired, but amazingly modern in her ideas, in her knowledge of books and the theater, of Harlem, and of everything then taking place in the world.” Hughes added: “I was fascinated by her, and I loved her.”
For Hughes and others, economic dependence on Godmother was not so much volunteer slavery as luxurious servitude. Mason not only doled out monthly allowances to her mostly male protégés, she also supplied them with hard-to-get theater tickets and, at least in Hughes’s case, fine bond writing paper and even finer suits from the best shops on Fifth Avenue. Seeking to remove any drains on Hughes’s creativity, Mason even footed the bill for Langston’s recalcitrant stepbrother, Gwyn Clark, to attend a New England preparatory school. In return, Hughes’s only obligation was to send a monthly itemized expense report to Godmother, who regarded the young poet as her “blessed child” and hailed him as “a golden star in the Firmament of Primitive Peoples.”
According to one rough estimate, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Mason gave between $50,000 and $75,000 to black writers and artists like Hughes. In today’s money, that’s close to $750,000.
Between 1928 and 1932, a significant chunk of this sum would go to Zora Neale Hurston. After her initial meeting with Mason, Hurston was invited back to 399 Park Avenue often enough to become accustomed to the muted bustle of the Swedish maids. Sculptor Cornelia Chapin and her sister, poet Katherine Biddle, were usually on hand during Zora’s visits to anticipate Godmother’s needs. And everyone seemed to speak in the hushed tones of vaulted money.
On December 8, 1927, Mason cracked open the door to the vault and summoned Hurston in. That Thursday, Zora went to Mason’s vast penthouse to sign an employment contract that would enable her to spend all of 1928 collecting Negro folklore in the South. If things went well and more time was needed, Hurston and Mason tacitly agreed, the contract would be extended through 1929.
Hurston had no reason, on the surface, to feel wary about entering into such an arrangement with Mason. After all, from the moment they’d met, Hurston knew they were destined to have a relationship. And the “psychic bond” between them, as she called it, already was becoming apparent. Hurston also knew, on a more practical level, that Mason was Godmother to Hughes, Miguel Covarrubias, and other friends—and that the alliance had served these artists well. The crucial difference, however, between Godmother’s contract with Hurston and her arrangement with her other “godchildren” was this: Mason hired Hurston as an “independent agent” to do research on her behalf. Unlike Hughes and others, Hurston was not funded to concentrate on her own work; instead, she was an employee—a hired hand.
Though choked with legalese, the contract made its origins clear: It had come about because Charlotte Mason was “desirous of obtaining and compiling certain data” but “unable … to undertake the collecting of this information in person.” Simply put, Mason was an elderly woman who could not do much outside her own home. Yet she wanted certain research conducted “among the American negroes,” as the contract stated. An able-bodied Zora Hurston, then, was hired to do the research for her. Specifically, Hurston was “to seek out, compile and collect all information possible, both written and oral, concerning the music, poetry, folk-lore, literature, hoodoo, conjure, manifestations of art and kindred subjects” among Negroes in the South. Further, she was to hand over all this information to Mason—“data, transcripts of music, etc.”—and to refrain from sharing the material with anyone unless she had Mason’s written approval to do so.
Because she was black, southern, a student of anthropology, and an already experienced folklore collector, Hurston was, of course, exponentially more suited for the research than Mason herself was, even if the widow had been well enough to undertake the project. In truth, Hurston was more qualified for the task than anyone. Knowing this, Mason agreed to compensate her with a decent wage—more money, in fact, than Zora had ever earned in her life. In exchange for Hurston’s research services, the notarized contract stated, Mason would pay her $200 a month—equal to about $2,000 today—and furnish her with both a motion picture camera and an automobile. (Zora would have to pay for her own auto insurance, the fussy contract insisted.)
Despite its finickiness, the legal document contained nothing that was inherently oppressive, one might argue. It is not at all uncommon for writers (and others) to hire researchers with the understanding that the results of the research belong to the employer. The potential problem, however, was Zora’s own literary and anthropological interest in the material—an interest that both women were aware of, but failed to address contractually. Since the contract gave Mason full control of any material Hurston collected, the old woman had no reason to bring up the matter. Seduced by Godmother’s largesse, Hurston did not broach the subject, either.
On the afternoon of December 14, less than a week after signing the contract, Zora boarded the 3:40 train at Penn Station en route to Mobile. Just before leaving New York, she wrote to Langston Hughes at Lincoln University, inviting him to join her for another southern summer and promising that things would be different this time: “I will have a better car ALL PAID FOR, and a better salary. Also, you MUST promise to ask ME first when you get strapped,” she admonished, all sister-love. Langston accepted Zora’s gentle chiding—and her occasional offers of money—like a man who was born to be coddled by women. Hughes’s troubled relationship with his mother (who often petitioned him for cash) had made him suspicious of all women yet especially susceptible to their kindness. Hence, he facilely accepted gifts from wealthy women like Mason and Amy Spingarn (who financed his Lincoln education), and even from friends like Zora. Yet Zora never felt exploited in this regard. She and Langston were close, and the trading of currency was part of their camaraderie. When she needed money, Zora knew, she could borrow from Langston and other friends; and when she had money, she lent it freely. Having just inked her deal with Mason, Zora felt flush and altruistic. Despite Hughes’s $150 monthly stipend from Godmother, Zora vowed to send him money out of her first check. “I know that you NEEDS,” she teased.
Zora was not as concerned, it seemed, about her husband’s needs—and she certainly did not invite Herbert Sheen to join her again in the South. During the previous autumn in New York, while Zora organized her notes from her first collecting trip, she and Sheen had lived as husband and wife for a brief time at her West Sixty-sixth Street apartment. Sheen had traveled to Manhattan to be with his wife soon after she and Hughes finished their southern excursion. In November 1927, Zora and Herbert joined all of Harlem in mourning singer-dancer Florence Mills, who’d died suddenly of appendicitis at the peak of her popularity. An ardent fan since 1921’s Shuffle Along, Hughes also was among the 57,000 people who filed by Mills’s casket; he skipped classes at Lincoln to attend the New York funeral, which ended with a flock of blackbirds flying over Mills’s grave at Woodlawn Cemetery. A month before, Zora and Herbert had seen Langston under more cheerful circumstances: They joined him, Ethel Waters, Nella Larsen, Carl Van Vechten, and others for dinner at the home of Carlo’s friend Eddie Wasserman.
Despite the couple’s occasionally high-profile social appearances, the Hurston-Sheen relationship was largely “a Fannie Hurst marriage”—a term the media had coined, with some disdain, after the famous novelist’s secret, five-year-old marriage (to Jacques Danielson) had come to light back in 1920. “LIVE APART, THEIR OWN WAY,” The New York Times had blared on page one. The incredulous headline had gone on to tell the whole story: “Meet By Appointment—It’s a New Method Which Rejects ‘Antediluvian Custom.’”
Hurston had not set out to imitate her former boss, but her approach to marriage, like Hurst’s, was remarkably advanced for the times. Zora seemed determined not to let marriage change the way she moved through the world—as a woman who was unencumbered, independent, and free. To that end, Zora kept her own name once she was married: She signed the contract with Mason as “Zora Hurston” and never appended the name “Sheen” to her own. Few of her friends in Harlem even knew she had acquired a husband. “Zora didn’t seem to fit into a kitchen or a marriage,” one acquaintance noted.
For the most part, the Hurston-Sheen relationship continued to be a long-distance one. Yet, even when they were together, the distance between them seemed to grow. Traveling again to the South—and encouraging Sheen to return to medical school in Chicago—appeared to be “a way out without saying anything very much,” Zora would recall. “Let nature take its course.” Apparently deciding nature needed some help, Zora abruptly severed her ties with Sheen in January 1928. The problem, again, was her career—or, perhaps more accurately, her fear that her career would stagnate in domestic bacteria if she remained with Sheen. “I am going to divorce Herbert as soon as this is over,” she told Hughes, “this” meaning her second folklore-collecting trip. “He tries to hold me back and be generally obstructive, so I have broken off relations since early January and that’s that.”
Free from all obstructions, real or imagined, Zora began her second southern expedition in the Mobile Bay. She made Cudjo Lewis her first stop not just because, as she told Hughes, “he is old and may die before I get to him otherwise.” Zora also had something to prove, if only to herself. She wanted to interview Lewis again to make up for the poor work that had spurred her to plagiarize, and she wanted to get material from him that no other researcher had successfully obtained. After a month or so, Hurston largely had accomplished both goals and eventually would write a book-length study of Cudjo Lewis. During a series of conversations at his home in Plateau, three miles from Mobile, Lewis recalled how his people, the Takkoi, had been captured by the warriors of neighboring Dahomey and sold to American slavers. Tears welled in his eyes as he described the trip across the ocean in the Clotilde. But what moved Hurston most about the old man—whom she always called by his African name, Kossola—was how much he continued to miss his people back in Nigeria. “I lonely for my folks,” he told her. “After seventy-five years, he still had that tragic sense of loss. That yearning for blood and cultural ties. That sense of mutilation. It gave me something to feel about,” Hurston wrote.
By January 31, Zora had finished her visit with Cudjo Lewis, bought a shiny gray Chevrolet (having sold off Sassy Susie), paid another visit to Eatonville, and moved into the living quarters of the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company in Loughman, Florida. About twelve miles below Kissimmee, Loughman was just across the line that divided Zora’s home county, Orange, from Polk County—where the water tasted like cherry wine, according to a popular folk song. Zora had heard “Polk County Blues” so often, she could sing it from memory: “You don’t know Polk County lak Ah do / Anybody been dere, tell you de same thing too.” Hurston longed to know Polk County as well as the song’s originator, and she was now free to get to know it on her own terms.
Liberated from the scientific dictates of Franz Boas and Carter G. Woodson, Hurston could utilize all that she’d learned from her field experience the previous year, but she no longer had to employ the techniques the two scholars required. Godmother only wanted results—as much folklore as Zora could collect—and didn’t care so much about form or method. Zora was free to do it her way, and she was thrilled: “I want to collect like a new broom,” she declared.
On February 29, 1928, when her long-sought bachelor’s degree in English finally was conferred by the signing of a document in New York City, Hurston could not have been farther away from Barnard’s consecrated corridors. The thirty-seven-year-old graduate was deep in the Florida woods answering the call of anthropology—and giving thanks, perhaps, that the leap year had afforded her an extra day for collecting.
In Loughman, Zora rented a room at a boardinghouse owned by the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company but run by a woman named Mrs. Allen. Her daughter, Babe Hill, had just gotten out of jail for shooting her husband to death. Because black men’s lives were not deemed valuable in the South, however, she had been required to serve only a few months’ time. “Negro women are punished in these parts for killing men, but only if they exceed the quota,” Hurston noted wryly. “I don’t remember what the quota is. Perhaps I did hear but I forgot.”
Babe Hill was a member of Loughman’s diverse black community, which included family men, Christian women, and itinerant preachers. She was among the work camp’s sizable population of hard-loving, weapon-wielding women who did not mind fighting for what they wanted. “Fan-foot, what you doing with my man’s hat cocked on your nappy head? I know you want to see your Jesus,” Zora heard such women say. “Fool wid me and I’ll cut all your holes into one.” The camp also had its share of hard-driving, rough-talking men who, as Zora delicately put it, did not “say embrace when they meant they slept with a woman.” Because of its transient nature, the sawmill camp was a place where love was quickly made and unmade: “Take you where I’m going, woman? Hell no!” men were heard to say. “Let every town furnish its own.”
During Zora’s first few nights at the boardinghouse, several men dropped by to check out the new addition to the quarters. But they said very little to her and bluffly fended off her efforts at friendliness. Zora’s Barnardese was long gone, yet she still was getting a tepid reception among the people she needed to know. “This worried me,” she admitted, “because I saw at once that this group of several hundred Negroes from all over the South was a rich field for folk-lore, but here was I figuratively starving to death in the midst of plenty.”
The men came regularly to the women’s boardinghouse for after-work socializing. Zora lent her guitar to a player who didn’t have one, and men and women began chatting with her easily between songs and sips of cola. Yet she remained an outsider. At once, Zora recognized that these were the same “feather-bed tactics” that had stymied her previous folklore-collecting efforts. “The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive,” she would write. “You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, ‘Get out of here!’ We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.”
Unlike the white questioner who might not know when his curiosity was being gently thwarted, Zora knew. She just didn’t know why. Finally, a young man she’d managed to befriend told her: Her shiny Chevy had convinced everyone that she must be a revenue officer or a detective of some kind. And since the law was often lax in these southern work camps, several of the Loughman laborers were fugitives or had served some jail time. They certainly did not want to get too friendly with someone like her.
That night, in order to win the lumber camp’s trust, Zora made up a plausible lie: She told everyone she was a bootlegger, on the run from the law in Jacksonville and Miami. It sounded reasonable enough; a bootlegger would need—and could afford—a car. Immediately, resistances began to melt.
The following Saturday night, Zora went to the bimonthly payday party, where soft drinks were served alongside “coon dick,” a strong, homemade whiskey. The music of choice was guitar music, and the only dancing was square dancing. Zora, whose mother had been a huge fan of the square dance, was eager to participate. But she watched in frustration as all the other women—women with names like Big Sweet and East Coast Mary—got escorted onto the dance floor. At five feet four inches tall, and weighing about 130 pounds, Zora had generous hips that whispered for attention, while her full lips and candid eyes dared would-be suitors to keep silence. Yet no one asked her to dance.
Vexed, Zora went outside where several people stood talking in small collections near the fire; her presence brought conversation to a lull. After a few awkward moments, a wiry man came over and introduced himself as Pitts. Appreciative of Zora’s laughing acceptance of his playful overtures, he let her in on a secret: A lot of men wanted to talk to her but were intimidated because they thought she was rich. Zora quickly scanned the crowd and saw that her $12.74 dress from Macy’s stood out sorely among all the $1.98 Sears catalog outfits that populated the party. Mentally resolving to “fix all that no later than the next morning,” Zora slipped into the handed-down language of Eatonville to assure Pitts that she was no better off—no different—than any of them. “Oh, Ah ain’t got doodley squat,” she said. “Mah man brought me dis dress de las’ time he went to Jacksonville. We wuz sellin’ plenty stuff den and makin’ good money. Wisht Ah had dat money now.”
Satisfied that she was one of them, Pitts treated Zora to some refreshments—her choice of roasted peanuts, fried rabbit, fish, chicken, or chitterlings—and asked her to dance. Soon, other men filled her dance card as well. Zora ended the evening standing on a table singing “John Henry” (a popular Negro work song) and inviting others to join in with the verses they knew. Vocally urged by all to “spread her jenk”—to have a good time—Zora did, and so did everyone else.
After that, Zora’s car was everybody’s car, and she was enjoined to sing “John Henry” at every party she attended—and she attended every one. In due time, she revealed to her new friends her real purpose for being there. They had trouble at first believing someone would want to document their tall tales and small-town lives. Zora convinced them of the value of their stories, however, by holding “a lying contest” and awarding prizes for the best-spun yarns. With this, the first of several such contests, Zora hit pay dirt. “I not only collected a great deal of material,” she recalled, “but it started individuals coming to me privately to tell me stories they had no chance to tell during the contest.”
The Loughman laborers felt comfortable going to Zora with their stories because she had become a part of their lives. Applying what anthropologists call the participant-observer technique, she immersed herself in the world of the sawmill camp. Writing to Langston Hughes about the folk opera they still planned to write, Zora confessed: “I have not written a line of anything since I have been down here. … I have several good ideas, but nothing worked out. I am truly dedicated to the work at hand and so I am not even writing, but living every moment with the people.”
Zora’s vocational ambivalence—which had first emerged in 1926 when she began studying anthropology—had temporarily resolved itself. For now at least, anthropology had won out over literature, simply because of the demands of her fieldwork. Hurston never consciously chose science over art, however; she always wanted to do both. In fact, her holistic, Eatonville-bred worldview would not have inclined her to regard it as an either/or question. Subconsciously, though, she had chosen anthropology over literature the moment she signed Charlotte Mason’s contract, which effectively prevented her from taking any artistic license with the scientific material she collected. Yet Zora still saw limitless literary possibilities in the lore: “I can really write a village anthology now,” she told Hughes, “but I am wary about mentioning it to Godmother for fear she will think I’m shirking, but boy I think I could lay ’em something now.” In another letter, she wrote: “I am getting inside of Negro art and lore. I am beginning to see really. … Langston, Langston, this is going to be big. Most gorgeous possibilities are showing themselves constantly.”
Hurston’s frequent correspondence with Hughes was full of fun and complicity, a natural outgrowth of the closeness they’d cultivated the previous summer. Langston kept Zora abreast of the latest gossip in New York: Novice actors Bruce Nugent and Wallace Thurman had joined the massive cast of the stage version of Porgy, he informed her. (“More power to them,” she responded.) Meanwhile, Zora had missed the biggest social event of the Harlem Renaissance: Countee Cullen’s April 9 marriage to Yolande Du Bois, W.E.B.’s daughter. Many among the three thousand guests at the extravagant ceremony believed it was the perfect marriage of intellect and beauty. Those who knew Cullen better—such as Hughes, who’d rented tails to serve as an usher at Cullen’s “parade,” as he called it—were not surprised when the homosexual poet announced he was sailing to Paris, not with his bride but with his best man, Harold Jackman. Cullen was going to Europe to study—armed with a Guggenheim fellowship, Langston told Zora. “A Negro goes abroad to whiteland to learn his trade! Ha!” Zora replied cynically. “That was inevitable for Countee. It will fit him nicely too. Nice, safe, middle-class.”
Along with the chitchat, Hughes advised Zora on ways to stay in Godmother’s good graces: At his suggestion, she sent Mason some fine carving wood from Mobile, for instance, and some succulent melons from Florida. She also needed to write to Godmother more regularly, Hughes counseled. Preoccupied with her work, Zora was satisfied that her psychic connection with Godmother had ripened and believed their telepathic communication was sufficient. Sometimes, for instance, a letter from Godmother would find her in the field, Zora noted, “and lay me by the heels for what I was thinking.” But telepathy was not enough for the old lady, Hughes cautioned; she needed more concrete and frequent reports on Hurston’s progress. In addition to this practical, watch-your-back advice, Langston constantly plied Zora with suggestions for her research—ideas that she found enormously helpful.
In turn, Hurston sent Hughes snippets of stories, an intercepted love letter from one informant to another, and pages of Negro verse—to use as he wished—straight from the mouths of the folk. She also became something of a publicity agent for Hughes in the South, reading regularly from his most recent collection of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew. “An interpretation of the ‘lower classes,’ the ones to whom life is least kind,” as Hughes described it, the 1927 book overflowed with blues and sexuality and the unvarnished voices of the black masses. Predictably, Negro critics panned it: One reviewer at New York’s Amsterdam News called Fine Clothes “about 100 pages of trash” and labeled Hughes a “sewer dweller.” The Chicago Whip was equally disgusted: “These poems are unsanitary, insipid and repulsing.” In Loughman, however, where Zora read from the book to kick off a lying contest, “they got the point,” she reported excitedly, “and enjoyed it immensely.” Seeing the reaction at the sawmill camp, Zora started reading Hughes’s poetry wherever she went. She began each storytelling contest by telling people who Langston Hughes was, then reading a few poems from what soon became known as “De Party Book.” “You are being quoted in R.R. camps, phosphate mines, turpentine stills, etc.,” Zora assured her friend.
Obeying Godmother’s command, Hurston was conducting her work in secret and in isolation. Her closeness with Hughes was helped along by the fact that he was one of the few friends who knew where she was or what she was doing. During this period, she was no longer in touch with Meyer, Hurst, Van Vechten, Lawrence Jordan, or any of her previous correspondents.
Hughes was not Hurston’s only pen pal and would-be adviser, however. She also was receiving letters from Alain Locke offering suggestions for her work. He urged Zora to implore Cudjo Lewis to avoid talking with other folklore collectors—white ones, no doubt—who he and Godmother felt “should be kept entirely away not only from the project in hand but from this entire movement for the rediscovery of our folk material.” He also advised Zora to pay particular attention to African survivals in the stories and games she collected and to look out for allusions to snakes and water. Such allusions, Locke advised, often showed up in the African literature he’d been reading recently.
Zora seemed to take Locke’s suggestions with a box of salt; she most certainly did not receive them as gratefully as she did Hughes’s advisories. Just the previous year, Hurston had envisioned herself, Hughes, and Locke as an intellectual triangle. She even sketched a figure to represent her vision, with herself and Hughes forming the triangle’s base and Locke at its apex. Now, however, she clearly valued Hughes’s thoughts far above those of her former Howard University professor. It was, perhaps, a case of the student exceeding the teacher. Of course, Zora was grateful to Locke for introducing her to Charlotte Mason—and, because he was Mason’s closest adviser, she made sure her correspondence with him was cordial. Zora even invited Locke to join her for a week or two in her southern travels. Even so, she harbored an intuitive distrust for the fastidious professor and shared her findings with him sparingly. She confided to Hughes: “I have come to 5 general laws, but I shall not mention them to Godmother or Locke until I have worked them out. Locke would hustle out a volume right away.”
The “5 general laws”—actually six—that Hurston outlined for Hughes provided a glimpse of the richness of the material she was collecting. Touching on a range of ideas—from the Negro penchant for drama and mimicry to the “restrained ferocity” of black music and dance—Hurston’s list of discoveries also illustrated just how much she had matured as an anthropologist.
Zora saved perhaps her most profound observation for the very end of her three-page epistle to Hughes. “Negro folk-lore is still in the making,” she announced in an enthusiastic postscript. “A new kind is crowding out the old.”
Hurston was eager to find an artistic outlet for this still-in-the-making folklore. And she was beginning to feel that writing it down was not enough. To be fully appreciated, this material needed to be performed—just as she had acted out Eatonville’s stories at Harlem parties. Black folklore, Zora felt, demanded a stage: “Did I tell you before I left about the new, the real Negro art theatre I plan?” she asked Hughes. “Well, I shall, or rather we shall act out the folk tales, however short, with the abrupt angularity and naivete of the primitive ’bama nigger. Just that with naive settings. What do you think?” Inviting Hughes to be a fifty-fifty collaborator in the proposed theater (“in fact,” she wrote, “I am perfectly willing to be 40 to your 60 since you are always so much more practical than I”), Zora barely could contain her zeal: “I know it is going to be glorious! A really new departure in the drama.” Hurston also offered Hughes a couple of street scenes to use in his own work, since she was contractually forbidden to use them. “Godmother asked me not to publish,” she noted, “and as I am making money I hope you can use them.”
Though Zora was beginning to chafe under Godmother’s no-publication restriction, she was thankful for the opportunity to focus so one-pointedly on her collecting work. With her car, her camera, and no worries about money, she was able to move about freely and collect copiously. After fewer than three months in the field, she told Hughes, “I believe I have almost as many stories now as I got on my entire trip last year.” With Loughman serving as her base, Zora took frequent jaunts to the phosphate mines in nearby Mulberry, Lakeland, and Pierce, where she collected a bundle of children’s tales and games, and met Mack Ford, a Pierce man who, in Zora’s words, “proved to be a mighty story teller before the Lord.”
Zora felt a warm familiarity with Ford, and others like him, because she’d spent a good deal of time in the company of such men. She’d grown up with six brothers, she’d routinely lingered among the mostly male storytellers on Joe Clarke’s porch, and she’d inhaled the aftershave-scented air of the Washington barbershop where she once worked as a manicurist. Consequently, Zora had developed an appreciation for maleness that served her well in her fieldwork. At the male-dominated work camps in Polk County and elsewhere, she was able to establish a convivial connection, a kind of brotherly trust, with the men without having to compromise herself sexually. Zora rapidly “dug in with the male community,” as she put it, and was even allowed to accompany a work gang to the cypress swamp, where Loughman’s men told enough tales to keep her scribbling in her notebook all day.
Though some women were jealous of her easy rapport with the men—especially those they claimed as their own—most of them liked Zora, too. She was particularly fortunate to have developed a friendship with Big Sweet, the most powerful woman in the lumber camp.
Big Sweet’s authority had become evident to Zora during her first week in Polk County, when Zora and three or four hundred other Loughman residents witnessed Big Sweet giving a public “reading” of an enemy. The word “reading” was borrowed from the fortune-tellers, and it was another way of describing the Negro tradition of playing the dozens, or signifying. No matter what she called it, Big Sweet was an expert at it: She swiftly silenced her opponent with a few well-selected phrases about his dubious ancestry. Later, Big Sweet—a heavyweight in size and influence but light on her feet—was chosen to judge the Loughman storytelling contests, primarily because no one would dare dispute her choice of a winner. As one resident advised Zora: “Tain’t a man, woman nor child on this job going to tackle Big Sweet.”
Big Sweet was the embodiment of the blues. She was Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and all the bad and brazen women they sang about rolled into one. Though she was rumored to have killed at least two men before arriving in Loughman, Big Sweet was not mean, folks said, she simply did not brook foolishness. Described by a male coworker as “uh whole woman and half uh man,” Big Sweet even struck fear in the lumber camp’s white boss. “Dat Cracker Quarters Boss wears two pistols round his waist and goes for bad,” Zora’s landlady told her, “but he won’t break a breath with Big Sweet lessen he got his pistol in his hand. Cause if he start anything with her, he won’t never get a chance to draw it.”
Wisely, Zora befriended Big Sweet, winning her over with her immense charm and ready wit—and frequent rides in the Chevy. In no time, Zora saw where the sweet part of her new friend’s name originated. Calling Zora “Little-Bit,” Big Sweet accompanied her well-traveled comrade on some of her collecting trips to nearby towns. “Big Sweet helped me to collect material in a big way,” Zora recalled. “She had no idea what I wanted with it, but if I wanted it, she meant to see to it that I got it.” Through the sheer force of her personality, Big Sweet prevailed upon balky informants to share their songs and stories. In gratitude—and in a girlish kind of bonding ritual—Zora gave Big Sweet one of her bracelets. Big Sweet, in turn, became Zora’s protector. “I aims to look out for you, too. Do your fighting for you,” she told Zora. “Nobody better not start nothing with you, do I’ll get my switchblade and go round de ham-bone looking for meat.”
Big Sweet’s vow soon was put to the test. A woman named Lucy began hurling slurs at Zora because of the inordinate amount of time she seemed to be spending with Slim, a man Lucy had once dated and still desired. Slim was a valuable source of material for Zora, so she frequently bought him drinks and let him ride in her car. Lucy, however, was convinced that Zora’s interest in Slim was sexual rather than scientific. Though Lucy and Slim had gone their separate ways long before Zora’s arrival in Loughman, the scorned woman blamed Zora for their breakup. Resenting the visitor’s store-bought clothes, shiny car, and lighter skin, Lucy began threatening Zora in a way that made her especially glad she had befriended Big Sweet. Lucy had been to jail occasionally for small fights, but she didn’t get the respect that was afforded Big Sweet because she had never killed anyone. Zora must have looked to Lucy like an easy target—and killing the nosy newcomer would not only eliminate a rival for Slim’s attention, it also would hurt the indomitable Big Sweet, who was Lucy’s archenemy.
At the next payday party, Lucy sought to make good on her threats by ambushing Zora. Long after midnight, when the soiree was in full swing, Lucy came in and immediately spotted Zora in a most incriminating position: leaning against the wall right next to Slim. Lucy “started walking hippily straight at me,” Zora recalled, with an open knife in her hand. The jook only had one door and Zora was far from it. There was no place to run except into the knife. “I didn’t move but I was running in my skin. I could hear the blade already crying in my flesh. I was sick and weak,” Zora recollected. “But a flash from the corner about ten feet off and Lucy had something else to think about besides me. Big Sweet was flying at her with an open blade and now it was Lucy’s time to try to make it to the door.” Big Sweet tackled Lucy before she could get to the exit, then all hell broke loose. “It seemed that anybody who had any fighting to do decided to settle-up then and there. Switch-blades, ice-picks and old-fashioned razors were out,” Zora observed in terror. One of Zora’s allies yelled for her to run. Though Zora was loath to leave Big Sweet in such a predicament, she knew Big Sweet could take care of herself. And under the circumstances, running was about all Zora could do. “Curses, oaths, cries and the whole place was in motion,” she noted. “Blood was on the floor.” Zora fell out the door, ran to her room, flung her bags into her car, and promptly shoved the Chevy into high gear. “When the sun came up,” she would remember, “I was a hundred miles up the road, headed for New Orleans.”